Excel Project

Our class project for the past two weeks has been focused on Microsoft Excel. There are so many uses for this application.  This project got me intimate with Excel's various subject areas, such as data formatting, printing, formulas, cell addressing, functions, and pivot tables.  We began with an Excel "scavenger hunt", which essentially were about 30 tasks in Excel.  Then, we used the techniques and knowledge learned from the scavenger hunt to do data analysis and reporting for a large fitness center assessing the effectiveness of a particular workout.  The analysis of the data was enhanced by creating two pivot tables in this Excel workbook to aid in the owner's research.  One pivot table was to answer the question, "How many subjects reached their target heart rate during the 15 minute exercise window".  The other pivot table was to answer the question, "Which demographic groups got the most benefit from the exercise regimen".  A screen capture of the demographic results of this data is below in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Pivot table showing average increase by gender and age group.

This project, like all projects in this course, has gone above and beyond my existing knowledge. I now have a better understanding of Excel's multiple uses, including pivot tables, functions, and absolute and relative cell addressing used in conjunction with formulas and functions. Using pivot tables allowed me to take a huge amount of structured data and create specific and understandable charts for analysis.  Also, absolute and relative cell addressing assisted in creating more dynamic formulas and functions.  I use Excel in my career for data analysis tasks, but with the knowledge I have gained from this project, I will be able to apply it to my job and exceed expectations when analyzing and reporting on data.